SAN-connected PC cluster

PC cluster systems have been so far widely used for many
applications. At present, shared-nothing architecture is employed, where all the resources such as CPU, memory and storage are independent among the nodes. Recently there emerged applications which handle huge amount of data, so called data-intensive applications. For such applications, storage architecture is more influential for the performance.

Our new cluster system has employed shared-disk architecture; serves and disks are interconnected through the recent storage area network (SAN) technology. We have proposed a new Storage Virtualizer, which provides shared file access mechanism and dynamic declustering strategy. Through experiments on the implemented system, we confirmed that dynamic load balancing and dynamic resource allocation can work much more effectively on the Storage Virtualizer.

• Demonstration

(Kazuo Goda)